Humor

Medium Dating

Who’s in your tunnel?

The one thing I’ve learned on Medium, I might have already known. Not everyone likes you. Some people think you’re okay. There are mutual appreciation societies here, where you find your people and everybody likes each other a lot. There are mentors and peers here. There are positive role models and negative role models. It’s the whole wide world.

I recently read about a couple who enjoyed their entire relationship over Medium. When they were in love, they wrote each other love letters through Open Letters.

Dear Aaron,

I hope this letter finds you. I will tag you so it does. I read your piece in Contemplate, where you spoke about such beautiful things like the planet and animals, which told me you were kind and empathic. I read your pieces on A Few Words, where I could see you were a man of few words, but such rich words.

Yers, Chastity.

Dear Chastity,

I received your tag and like they say in the playground, you’re it. I am not sure why you chose those publications that I wrote in, specifically. I also write humor and can be very funny. I’m not just a wordy-feely guy. Check me out on MuddyUm and Haven. If you can’t appreciate my sense of humor, there might not be a place for us.

Yers, Aaron

Dear Aaron,

I’m too busy writing articles for at least twenty different publications to deal with your insecurities. There are some great articles about knowing yourself in Illumination and Know Thyself Heal Thyself that you might want to check out before you start writing love letters to any other writers on Medium.

Not yers, Chastity

Chastity and Aaron are not alone. We’re all Chastity and Aaron, finding people through ideas. What we click on, brings us closer to what we care about and who our tribe is. I got my political people, my humor people, my exercise people, my spiritual people, and their words are their voices, their faces, and their minds.

Medium, I have learned so much from you. This is a place where people work out their own shit, through rumination, humor, activism, poetry, letters, fiction, and words.

Medium is a big whiteboard on the web, where we quell the voices in our heads and then build upon them.

If there’s one thing on Medium I have learned, I might have already known. And it’s this. We each see the world through our own tunnel-visioned lenses. Sometimes, when you’re walking through your tunnel, you turn around and see other people smiling at you, and you clap and say, “Wassup?” And it’s all good.

Other times you’re moseying along in your tunnel and see someone else in there with you. They say, “You suck,” and you respond clap clap, it’s all good.

The one thing I’ve learned on Medium is that it’s better when you show up, because when you don’t show up, you’re not even there.